5/20/2025 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S22-E07

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In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Alli Alosa – Hi there! I’m Alli 🙂 I’m a fine artist turned “techie” with a passion for organization and automation. I’m also proud to be a Community Leader in the Airtable forum, and a co-host of the BuiltOnAir podcast. My favorite part about being an Airtable consultant and developer is that I get to talk with people from all sorts of industries, and each project is an opportunity to learn how a business works.

Kamille Parks – I am an Airtable Community Forums Leader and the developer behind the custom Airtable app “Scheduler”, one of the winning projects in the Airtable Custom Blocks Contest now widely available on the Marketplace. I focus on building simple scripts, automations, and custom apps for Airtable that streamline data entry and everyday workflows.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

Meet the Creators – 00:01:41 –

Meet Chrisiana Dominguez from YMCA.

Christiana Dominguez is a long time YMCA volunteer who specializes in leadership training and program management. She loves helping people-based organizations more efficiently manage their data and projects so that every can spend the most time possible moving their missions forward.

Visit them online

Base Showcase – 00:01:41 –

We dive into a full working base that will Better processes help meet the mission: how Airtable helped an organization ensure that more students are civically engaged and ready for the challenge of leadership.

A Case for Interface – 00:01:42 –

Explore Interfaces with “Updated Timelines”.

Kamille walks through the updates to the timeline interface.

View Script

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:40

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Segment: Meet the Creators

Start Time: 00:01:41

Chrisiana Dominguez –

Meet Chrisiana Dominguez from YMCA.

Christiana Dominguez is a long time YMCA volunteer who specializes in leadership training and program management. She loves helping people-based organizations more efficiently manage their data and projects so that every can spend the most time possible moving their missions forward.

Visit them online

Segment: Base Showcase

Start Time: 00:01:41

Airtable at YMCA

We dive into a full working base that will Better processes help meet the mission: how Airtable helped an organization ensure that more students are civically engaged and ready for the challenge of leadership.

Segment: A Case for Interface

Start Time: 00:01:42

Updated Timelines

Explore Interfaces with “Updated Timelines”.

Kamille walks through the updates to the timeline interface.

View Script

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Built On Air Podcast, the variety show for all things Airtable. In each episode, we cover four different segments. It's always fresh and different, and lots of. Fun while you get the insider info on all things Airtable. Our hosts and guests are some of the most senior experts in the Airtable community.

Join us live each week on our YouTube channel every Tuesday at 11:00 AM Eastern and join our active [email protected]. Before we begin a word from our sponsor onto air backups onto OnAir backups. Provides automated Airtable backups to your cloud storage for secure and reliable data protection, prevent data loss, and set up a secure Airtable backup system with.

Onto air [email protected]. As one customer Sarah said, having automated Airtable backups has freed up hours of my time every other week, and the fear of losing anything longtime [00:01:00] customer, David states on-air backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster.

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Dan Fellars: Welcome in to the Built On Air Podcast. We are in episode seven of season 22. Good to be back with you. It's Tuesday morning, myself, Ali, and Camille, and we are joined by Christiana. Welcome Christiana. Hi. Thanks having me. Nice to have you with us. We'll learn more about her, her story later in the show.

I'll first walk us through what we're gonna be talking about [00:02:00] today. We'll start with our, around the bases and all the updates and news and what's going on in Airtable in the different communities. Then we will have a sponsorship by ware onto our backups. And then we'll learn about Christiana, sorry I spelled your name wrong there.

Dominguez and her background and story and, what she's been up to and how she found Airtable. And then she's gonna show us a base that she has worked with at the YMCA where she volunteers and how it's helping the youth prepare for leadership and, and whatnot. And then shout out to join our community.

And then we'll wrap it up with a segment from Camille on brand new feature, updated timelines that just came out last week. So with that.

Around the bases. Let's jump in. First, give a shout out to Nelson Wang, who runs the partner group at Airtable. [00:03:00] They were just announced that they won the partner program of the year award from partnership leaders.

So congrats to Nelson and Kim and, and Sam and the team there at Airtable. They do a great job. And I've appreciated working with them as a partner, and so I just wanna give a shout out to them on that award well deserved.

Okay, here's one for the technical audience. Airtable has an engineering blog that's pretty interesting and every couple months they, they post, they post something and I like it. They give some insights into how things work under the hood. And so here it talks about their Kubernetes environment and how it works.

And sometimes we take for granted like how complex under the hood Airtable is with all the different bases and all the automations, everything going on, and data syncing. I can't imagine like having to manage all that and doing upgrades. [00:04:00] And sometimes there's outages. I think last week there was a outage for a bit.

But it's a complex environment to, to keep up and running. 

Kamille Parks: Yeah. I'm not gonna pretend to understand how to architect the backend that is Airtable. And the outages are always interesting because it's much like all of the businesses, myself included, that kind of run on Airtable. Airtable runs on other businesses themselves.

So if they go down, Airtable goes down and then we go down. So it's kind of like, it could be a number of different things that could be going wrong, and then just this chart alone kind of makes evident how complex the air table's piece of the puzzle is. Yeah. 

Dan Fellars: Yep. So yeah, they rely heavily on Amazon.

They're all in AWS and so definitely dependent on Amazon. There are many companies. [00:05:00] So yeah, if you'd like to dig under the hood, check out that blog post. Okay. Some big news they announced five X cheaper for the Airtable AI tokens. S probably still is a black box, but it's a smaller black box to, I understand the costs.

Alli Alosa: I'm still so lost. I'm so confused. Here we go. 

Dan Fellars: Understanding credit tables. Let's see. Does this help? 

Alli Alosa: Probably not new 

Dan Fellars: credits. Each AI action will use, oh, so this is new. Okay. You can use this preview. So where is the preview? 

Alli Alosa: It shows at the bottom of the, like a long text field. It shows it at the very bottom.

Yeah, they 

Kamille Parks: within the product. Okay, very good. But 

Alli Alosa: then it doesn't actually show you how much it did use, [00:06:00] it shows how much an estimate. Yeah, it just estimates, and that's not necessarily like. You know, you could have different links on different records all in there, and I, I would just love a log of like, this many credits went to this.

Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. 

Chrisiana Dominguez: Mm-hmm. I'm still waiting for a log of how many API calls you used last month, and I don't think that exists either. So.

Kamille Parks: Oh, Airtable. It's, it's the little things. I know we just talked about how complicated it is to build and maintain an application such as Airtable, but at the same time, I'd like to see some running totals of the stuff that I'm paying for. That'd be nice. Mm-hmm. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah, and it is complicated 'cause even, you know, the, it depends on what model you're [00:07:00] running and all sorts of factors.

And even those models, like it's all dependent on the input. They should be able to show the log. And so that, you can see that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's tricky. 'cause they gotta get that log information from, from their provider. Yeah. First it out. Yeah. 

Alli Alosa: Yeah. 

Dan Fellars: But it is good news. Overall. It's cheaper. So that's good.

Alli Alosa: That is very good. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. Probably not good. Last, was it last week we had on the AI app that one of their big selling points was being cheaper than Airtable. It still was a cool app, how it worked but not as advantageous on that front. No. Okay, next one we're gonna talk about this, but just highlight enhanced Gantt timeline.

That's what Camille's gonna walk us through later in the show, so that's nice. They're improving the timeline [00:08:00] interface, so we'll dive deep into what that means and what you get later on. So stick around. Okay, next one. Shout out to Max. He's been on the show a few times. Today in an hour or two hours we'll be doing a spotlight on how he's helped Atlantic Records UK and you wanna a demo there?

Kamille Parks: It's actually Thursday. 

Dan Fellars: Oh, Thursday, that's right. Mm-hmm. So you got two days to get ready for it. Very good. Next one, a new button. So this is a new feature not posted in there. What's new section? So now it says when you want to unlock a view, instead of unlocking it, you could duplicate it as a personal view.

Good, bad, useful. 

Kamille Parks: I think it's decent. There's a lot of times where, we set up views that sync out to other bases. And so we lock [00:09:00] them once we set them up. And if it's not a complicated table, you might just have two views, grid view, and then the one that sinks and, for people a little less familiar with our practices, they might think, oh, I'll just do a quick filter on this one.

'cause it's the first one that pops up. And this button will kind of help guide people to say, I'm not saying you can't set a filter, but you just, you can't do it here. Make your own view and do all the filtering you want. Yeah. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. For me, I don't know, like if I'm, if I'm going to unlock a view, it's because I need to modify that view.

You know, if I, I would duplicate it or whatever. So I don't know. I, I haven't used that option yet. But yeah, Ben says it'd be nice to have an auto timer to where you unlock it and then it locks itself after 30 minutes or something. 

Kamille Parks: I think it. It should [00:10:00] lock when you leave, when it notices, you've navigated away.

Airtable keeps track of what the active view is. Yeah. Or the active table. And if you leave, that's why Chrome and Firefox and all the other browsers have multiple tabs. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. 

Kamille Parks: Go to a different tab. But if you go within that same base to a different table, I think it should automatically lock the view.

Dan Fellars: That's a good idea. Yep. That could work. Justin agrees leaving luck. Okay, next one. This one's coming from Reddit. This is kind of a cool little hack. So freeway to export Airtable to excel, Google sheets with images. So this is kind of nice. And so, so basically you export everything as a CSV. And that will give you JSON representation.

Of the image, but it won't give you like the URL itself. So [00:11:00] here's a formula you can put inside of your Google sheet to extract it and then actually display the image. Now I will say that that image has a timeout associated with it, so over time, but I think it might just, I don't know if it just displays it or does it import the image.

So here's the picture. I think it just displays it. So these are gonna time out at some point. Yeah. So, but yeah, that's kind of cool. Little hack. Try that. Helpful 

Kamille Parks: for migration tasks. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. So, okay, back to the Airtable community. This is a cool new product out there. Crust ai, you can check it out. Tri Cust ai, I started to play with it.

I still need to evaluate this more. But it's kind of building mini apps called snippets. It's all built on top of Airtable. [00:12:00] So the data stays in Airtable, it does have editable fields. You can build. Different apps. I think it might be geared towards mobile, but I think you can do web as well.

So new, new front interface builder, top of Airtable. Check that out. 

Kamille Parks: And the user interface looks pretty nice and clean for all the examples you scrolled through. I am reminded of when Airtable changed the name of blocks the second time and in the Airtable community it was, I remember one thread was just, how do you define an app?

And it felt very existential. The word snippet makes me think, here's another word that we could have just said up. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah, yeah, true. Here. Here's another app posted in, in [00:13:00] Reddit flexi page. So if you're still looking for a way to generate PDFs, this one's in the marketplace. So it actually runs inside an extension.

So you could check that out. There's, there's similar options out there as well. And but yeah. Here's one more. 

Kamille Parks: So Airtable has recently like publicly demonstrated extensions are coming to interfaces, who knows when, but eventually and this feels like something that would be very interesting to see.

Moved over to the interface side because printing in Airtable has always been. Not great. Yep. In brief, not great. And I like seeing more and more options to generate your own PDFs. Some of them are very intricate where you can make hyper designed pages and other ones give you sort of the bare bones.

Can't really tell [00:14:00] how custom you can get with this one, but. I would be interested in seeing things like this and some of the other ones in the world where we're finally extensions within interfaces. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. Speaking of which, there was another post on that specific topic. A new video came out a couple days ago from Airtable, Phil or Philip gives a demo walkthrough and kind of showcases how we built it.

I watched this video, did you guys watch it? 

Kamille Parks: No. So I know I just said that I was thinking of the other announcement. I haven't seen this yet. 

Dan Fellars: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There was one we showed. So this is one, he actually goes through the process of building an extension and how he vibe codes it. So vibe, code's, kind of the concept of using AI to generate your code.

And he does, he, he does mention, he, he does it all in, in cursor, so outside of Airtable, but he mentions they're gonna make it to where you can, where you can [00:15:00] use the AI inside of Airtable. And I don't know, they're gonna build their own code editor or something similar to a bolt or, or lovable. 

Kamille Parks: That seems like a folly.

I don't know why they would invest in that, given the complexity. Whatever. I do like that. You could do it from cursor though, because that means you could also write your own code and if you wanted to use AI you could. Right. So, so far I kind of like this approach, and I also appreciate Airts commitment to their standard, like fake company they use.

All in marketing is a shoe. It's warehouse. So a 3D shoe viewer is how they've described whatever app that Philip is building and, I don't know, commitment. Yeah. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah, it's actually turned out pretty cool. You got a 3D viewer of their shoes. It's pulling from Airtable. One cool thing that he [00:16:00] showed right up in here.

So you can have different view types. I'll go back to the original. Let's see here. Yeah, okay. So you can have the standard one. So, and then it's just in the dropdown, there's a custom. And then the custom takes over everything underneath. So that's how custom extensions work. 

Kamille Parks: Interesting. I was not expecting that. That's, that is very interesting. 

Alli Alosa: I hope you can change the word custom to something else.

Yeah. '

Kamille Parks: cause I, you could build multiple extensions. So which one is which? 

Dan Fellars: You may not be able to, just like, you can't have multiple gallery views. Right? Same page. You'd have to create another page. 

Kamille Parks: Yeah. But you, I assume they let you redeploy one custom extension in multiple places. Is is what I [00:17:00] mean in that like, I have developed multiple extensions and they all have different names.

So in the dropdown, I would like to know what I'm switching to. Just, you know. Yeah, 

Dan Fellars: I think it, it would be associated with this page, so right. Yeah. Yeah. That's silly. 

Kamille Parks: Air Airtable, I, I've seen your SDK, that's that how you wrote it originally. 

Dan Fellars: So here you see, so this is the configuration, so it has the develop and so assuming this develop is gonna bring up, text editor similar to their script editor. 

Kamille Parks: Right. One, one last thing. I know we have other stuff there. Documentation for the inex, the extensions for interfaces. It does imply that you have to go to builder hub to create a new extension and if you've used extensions within the last [00:18:00] few years or so.

Or developed your own extensions within the last few years or so. In Builder Hub, you have the option of like giving it a name and a description and and whatnot. So I'm, I'm kind of trying to reconcile them saying you have to make it from builders hub and it being. Dedicated to a page, like the first page you develop it on is the only one it can live in, which is how blocks used to be written.

And then they updated it. So I, I hope we're not sliding backwards 'cause I would be annoyed. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. I don't see a name field to give it a name. 

Kamille Parks: Ugh, boo. 

Dan Fellars: But yeah, we'll see how that evolves. But regardless, excited, this definitely is. A game changer in what it can unlock. So yeah, they said that they started rolling it out to people on the waiting list.

I did not make the cut. I'm on the wait list and did not [00:19:00] get an invite. But they said this week they started giving access, so. I sure hope this 

Kamille Parks: isn't for enterprise only. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. 

Kamille Parks: See? 

Dan Fellars: All right, Stan, on kind of the similar realm, if you are a Cursor user, if you know what it is visual Studio Code Code is actually backed by Microsoft.

They just announced that they're open sourcing their AI editor, which is an interesting move which is powered by GitHub copilot. And so they're going after, I think the news between windsurf getting acquired by Open AI and the progress that Cursors made. They're realizing they gotta catch up.

They kind of, they came. GitHub copilot was probably the first major one to enter and then they kind of got passed up. So they've got some catching up to do, so they're gonna open source it. [00:20:00] So we'll see how that goes. Okay, that concludes our round. The bases gets you everything that you need to know up to date and news.

Let us know if we missed anything with that.

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But onto is, is the best place to start for that. So that's how people think about it. Okay. With that Christiana Dominguez, we, I'm gonna put you up on the middle, learn a little bit about you. 

Chrisiana Dominguez: Hi. Thanks so much for, for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Alli Alosa: Yay. We're excited and happy you here as well. Thank you for joining us.

Yeah. So share a little bit about myself. Yeah, that would be great. I know you've been around for a couple years. I first met you at Dare Table and. Was it 2023, I think in San Francisco. Yeah. It 

Chrisiana Dominguez: must've been in San Francisco. Yeah. 

Alli Alosa: Excellent. [00:22:00] Well, glad to have you on the show. And yeah. How long have you been using Airtable for?

Chrisiana Dominguez: I have been using Airtable. I'm trying to remember what year. I, I, so I am, I was a reluctant initial Airtable user, which is a story I use with other people. I'm trying to get to merge onto Airtable. Because I'm like, ah, Google sheets and forms. I don't know. What are you talking about? I'm fine. We don't need anything else.

And so I think I had some friends who spent two years going like, this is better. You should use this. And I didn't wanna learn new things which I find is a common unfortunate adult characteristic. But I finally, I finally saw the light. So I've probably been using it for, I don't know, at least eight or nine years at this point.

And in my world of sort of. Educators and volunteers. I'm an Airtable expert, and then I went to DARE table and was like, oh, I don't know anything. I am, I'm as far on the no code, no code side of things as, as humanly possible. So I probably left that event going with a little bit of a, a winds world.

I'm not [00:23:00] worthy vibe, but but we we're, we're, we're able to, to do pretty good things with it. So the, our main, the main entry point for me was using it to manage a youth program. And now it definitely runs like most aspects of my life from, you know, I don't know, menu planning to just really keeping track of everything.

So I'm highly dependent on it now and bristle at Google Sheets or email attachments or, or anything else. So. I've fully consumed all of the necessary Kool-Aid at this point, and someday I'll learn to code a little bit and then I'll, I'll be totally unstoppable. But but yeah, so our, you know, our main, our main use of this and kind of why I'm, what I'm here to talk about today is our YMCA Youth and government program.

So this exists actually in 30, I think 37 states throughout the country. I'm based in California, so my view is like focusing what we do here. The program's been around nationwide since [00:24:00] 1948. And our motto is that democracy must be learned by each generation, which I think is, has always been important, but at a time when there seems to be renewed interest in like how our institutions of government do or are supposed to work it's feels especially important.

And so our program goal is to raise the next generation of civically engaged Californian specifically for us which really just means kids who grow up to be voters who are active in their communities, who like read a newspaper ever maybe who know what a newspaper is these days or like what is a credible solution and value servant leadership like specifically as a model.

So we do this by teaching kids. Practical skills like research, media literacy, leadership lessons, ensure they know the basics of like civics knowledge, awareness, engagement. Like what, what to do and where the levers are to pull, to build whatever they wanna build, right? We're not a partisan program. We just wanna teach you how government is supposed to function and how a democracy's supposed to function.

And then [00:25:00] it's up to them to figure out like what do they want that to look like, you know, hopefully throughout their lives. So. On the tactical side of things, we do this by meeting in local groups. We call 'em delegations. There's about 64 of them statewide. That's down from pre pandemic when we have like 85, but we're still getting back into the swing of things still.

We have two conferences a year, which is where Airtable like really comes into its own for us. We have a training conference on the Army base in the middle of California. And then we have our full model legislature in court, which takes place here in Sacramento. So we're the, we're the hometown crowd for that, which is pretty cool.

And the kids have to model all, they model all aspects of government. So they make their own legislature and they have their own courts and, and they just, it's, it's one really big dorky roleplaying game for high school students. But you're roleplaying like government. So they're just LARPing all over the place.

They just don't really know it. 

Like [00:26:00] five of them know what that is. The rest of 'em are closed, but that's what they're doing. So and they're not there on their own. Right? Because that would be crazy to have 2000 teenagers unsupervised. So there's like 400 adults that are there. I'm one of those adults trying to help them make good choices.

And so that created a couple of problems. Like if our, our main motto, you know, is to make sure that democracy is learned by each generation. So. The two problems that flow outta that when you're trying to manage them is, is really our first charge as the adults is how do we keep these 2000 kids safe while they're learning about stuff?

Mm-hmm. Supervision, just like looking at them is the, the best way to do that. So how do we know where they are or where they're supposed to be, or you know, what they're doing. And then the second and related problem is focused on like the substance rather than the people management. So how do we make sure everyone has access to the resources we develop, like.

So that everyone's kind of learning or has the ability to learn the same things at meetings when we're all across the state for most of the time when we only come together at least two different points, and it, [00:27:00] there has to be whatever solution we find for that has to be exceedingly low cost. Because we're a nonprofit and this is a program for students.

So if we could charge like $10,000 a kid, we probably, maybe we would just be paying CNT to organize everything for us. But that's not the case. And it has to be mobile friendly. And so once upon a time we use Google Sheets and then I, can I share my screen now? I'll walk through some of this.

Dan Fellars: Sure. 

Chrisiana Dominguez: I'm sorry. Yeah, 

Alli Alosa: and that's, that's funny. That was gonna be my next question was were you on a different program before switching to Airtable? 

Chrisiana Dominguez: Yeah, so like for, oh, when I started, so I've been working with this program for close to 20 years. And when I first started, it was like an Excel spreadsheet and a hard copy piece of paper, and you had to like write kids' names down and it, it, it worked in that time, you know it was fine.

And then with the advent of, of Google Sheets, we moved to that and Google forms and that was okay, but but you had a lot of people who didn't really know how to use [00:28:00] it. There would be like one person who knew what a V lookup was and nobody else did, and, and people would frequently break it.

So you'd go to the public roster and you'd see this most of the time, 

Or you'd have, you know, copy of, copy of, copy of, and you didn't know who, or like what was the actual one we were supposed to be using. And so it didn't, it didn't work well, it worked better than paper, but it didn't really work well enough to be a, a full management system.

And so when I finally listened to my friends. Who are saying there's something better. I first implemented Airtable locally just with my group of, of delegates. And the breakthrough for me there was really its mobile capabilities. So the fact that I could have in my pocket, and I think, I don't have my, oops, I don't have that screen ready, but the fact that I could in the, just the mobile interface of the basic app.

No, no special interfaces, no nothing, you know, however many years ago was [00:29:00] fantastic 'cause being able to pull up a list of kids, being able to have their picture in there so that I could walk into a room and say like, whose faces should I see? Or using it, like a photo lineup, like, show me who was rude to you.

And being able to call them or their mom directly from that app was a game changer. And then it took another couple of years to actually get statewide buy-in on this concept. So, we really the pandemic helped us finally like, bite the bullet and, and move. Obviously in 2020 or actually in 2020 itself, we had our statewide conference like at the middle of February.

So we were able to get that in before COVID was a thing. But then going into the following year when we couldn't meet in person, we weren't gonna have any statewide conferences. We had to find some way to administer this program. You know, sort of asynchronously and also get to people where they were.

So what that turned into was the first time that we created we had two separate bases. [00:30:00] We had a curriculum base where we could put all of our resources, all of our meeting resources. One thing that helped win people over was the ability to have attachments directly in. The database itself.

So this was kind of the first thing we were able to roll out to people and that they were willing to learn how to use because it was easy for both the adult advisors who were trying to do things on Zoom and the students to, to find things. And then, because this was like the pre interface era, we also used Sync faces to create a public roster.

So we were able to share information in a way that kept student info safe because we didn't really wanna be sharing like. Phone numbers and email addresses of minors around the internet. So we could use sync bases to get that information in front of the rest of the program. And you could look things up and, and looking at work product and, and find people easily there.

So so that was that was the first time we really were able to get statewide buy-in. That was kind of [00:31:00] what I'd say. You know, iteration two of, of my use of Airtable with, with the program. And then during during the COVID era and the year after, we had moved sort of a hybrid model. So people were meeting locally, but the conferences were still online.

That's when the first time we tried out interfaces which worked okay when everybody was online. But weren't really a solution when we were back in person because they are, they weren't mobile friendly at that point, and they still aren't the most mobile friendly, especially for an Android user.

Which I am, and enough, enough of our participants are that, that they were really hobbled. I will say side note, the best aspect of our year where our conferences were online and we were using interfaces, was forcing everybody to join Airtable. And we are still I'm still powering a lot of what I do off the credits that we earn for forcing a couple thousand people to use the referral link for that.

So that's great. But long term that [00:32:00] interfaces were not really the solution that we needed them to be. So the next iteration, I'd say like iteration four, but probably like 20 in reality. Was learning about and using Cory? So I think I learned about Cory at Daret in in 2023. I had only really looked at like the Airtable universe itself and not all of the fun things you can do with third party apps.

And so playing around with Cory really unlocked Airtable in a way that we could have people connect with our resources more easily because it was. A lot to remind people where things were, right. You had to go to the interface for some stuff, but then there's some info. So wanted a public roster and there were too many places.

So, so now we have everything. Our base is, is a one-stop shop. So we have all of our curriculum and we have our our public or our roster information in one base. But where people interact with that primarily is on our [00:33:00] Cory website. Which we still use the Pori app address. So we kind of refer to it just as the pori within the program rather than the website.

And this is, this is where we are now. It's not the most, most attractive homepage, which is solely my responsibility, but we might improve that for next year. But what that gave everybody again, was a, an in your pocket single source of information. That worked really well for us. And so some of the things that, that have helped.

Us kind of level up is we're able to save on a lot of printing costs because we have a conference schedule that's online that's searchable and filterable and now is not gonna load 'cause I'm trying to show it to people. I will blame. That's probably my internet. And not Cory's fault, but it's, it's relatively, you know, it's a relatively basic, there's nothing here that's gonna, you know, win any design awards, but it does what we need it to do, which is, it makes it easy for, for our students and the adults to look up and see where they need to be and when we like that we can embed forms.[00:34:00] 

Here. We have, you know, we encourage people to send kudos, which is basically like an attaboy or add girl to somebody else. Telling 'em they're doing a good job. And it's just nice to have one address and not have to explain, like, go to this, go to this table and go to this view to find the thing that you're looking for.

Some of our I think most helpful resources here are a different page. Our students' rights. Student authored legislation. And so we're able to have all of those the actual bill language on here, that's all viewable. What they're you know, what they're writing, what they're debating when they're together, has their information.

We've got legislative analysts and lobbyists who have to write reports, and so again, all this is in their pockets. So we're not printing as many papers. And everybody has access to it. And because Corey is mobile on both iOS and Android, everybody can use it all the time. And they're not really worried about, you know, logging in and out of things or, or trying to get that backend access.

And then we have lots of resources for [00:35:00] adults as well. My favorite being the Kid Finder 3000 which helps us know where every single kid is supposed to be at all times. So if you can't find them. You know, if you need to get to somebody, you can look up the rooms they're supposed to be in. There's quite a, an array of, you know, the, the reason that that relational database is key is you've got a student, and a student has a program area and it has, they have a delegation and they have a hotel room, and they have all these categories, right?

So so being able to tie everybody together really makes it easier for the adults to do what they need to do to find them and keep them safe. So some of these are, are protected. So only adults can access this that has the student or has the phone number for the person who's supposed to be in charge of them.

It does technically not on the student that I'm sharing here, but it has the students' contact information as well. So adults can, can try to get to them if they need to. And then we still have all of our resources on here as well. So that you can look up your, you know, [00:36:00] meeting curriculum or whatever it is that you need to get to to share.

We have our calendar and we have all kinds of stuff. A lot of this is of course when you, that's filtered 'cause we're done with the program here. Oh, some of this is of course leading a horse to water and trying to get them to drink. But nobody can say that we don't have the resources available to them.

Because everything is on here. It got really high remarks. We included questions about this resource in our program, surveys for the year, and people definitely appreciated having that one place to go to see everything. And so this helps us deliver on our program mission because we can be sure that everyone has access to the same information at the same time.

It's correct. So you're not worried if you've got, if you're looking at the wrong Google sheet at any point in time. And it's doing all those things that we love in a relational database where you're just changing, you know, one thing, one time in the right table and it's populating everywhere it needs to go.

I'd say the only cha, the main challenge we have with using a platform like Cory that's not native to Airtable [00:37:00] is I still forget that if you're updating like a, a field name and you're just dealing with the interface, when you update it in the base, it's gonna update on the interface. And if you update it in the base here, it's just gonna break your four page.

And then you have to go in and, and, you know, reconfigure that. So, but as long as we remember that we do pretty well with keeping everything, everything up to date, so that is how we use your table. And four, 

Dan Fellars: what I'm. Are, are you the main one still managing at all or do you have other people helping out?

Chrisiana Dominguez: I'm not the only one. I am one of the main ones. But we do have we, we do have staff adoption, so I'm a volunteer and I'm pri I'm, I kind of, my first responsibility is to my local kids, but I've been around so long that I do a lot of stuff at the statewide level as well. So I work really closely with the handful of paid staff that work on this out of the YMCA, out of the YMCA in Southern [00:38:00] California.

So it's definitely not only me but but that is the other advantage is enough people now know the basics of Airtable, that they can go in and like, add the resources, update them, and then it's gonna populate over here without anyone having to know how to like code a website or update a website or, or whatever.

So once, once everybody kind of understood, like, my really bad analogy is that Airtable is a, is a broadcasting studio. And Cory is just the television stuff that you're tuning to, like a particular, you know, feed. And so getting people to understand you don't actually have to touch Cory at all. You just need to update Airtable and broadcast what you want.

And it's gonna, like, don't worry, it's gonna take care of it. So it's, I do a lot with it, but I'm not the only one, thankfully. Nice. 

Kamille Parks: That's a good analogy. Yeah. 

Alli Alosa: Yeah. I love that. I feel like people. Like that's, that's kind of often the turning point for people is when they realize like, oh, like we changed our phone number and I don't, now I don't need to go to six pages on my [00:39:00] website and forget about the other three, inevitably until two years later and someone says it's wrong, and you're like, exactly.

Oh, I just changed one field and it's 

Chrisiana Dominguez: all the way out there. Which is awesome. Exactly. That's, I mean, probably the other biggest challenge we have with, with Tori is sometimes, how do we. How do we structure some stuff on the back end so that that works? Because there definitely is a place, you know, for just like a, a block of text you know, to be in there.

But then you have to remember, you have to go back and update the block of text. So there's these links that are, that are in here like our, the public roster link and whatnot. We do have to update that each year. And so we're getting, we're getting close to the point that summer we're gonna start rolling everything over and like building out next year's space and figuring out the best way to do that.

And I. What we're going to do going into this next year is, instead of what we've done every year is we, we we clone the base, we give it a new name, we have to remap everything. And so I think this year what we might do is [00:40:00] not the primary base might just like survive on its own. And then we'll, we'll make a copy to archive the data so we're not going back through to like re update all of the links.

But it's still so much better than, than anything that we had before that required way more. Like hand massaging to get it up to date. 

Kamille Parks: Absolutely. 

Dan Fellars: Very cool. That's cool stuff. Is it fair to say if you hadn't built this, you probably wouldn't have a solution? 

Chrisiana Dominguez: Yeah, no, we wouldn't, yeah. We would still be using just like a shared Google Drive and hoping people could guess the, guess the right name for things or, or, you know, control off their way to whatever resources they they needed.

Nothing else was. As workable and also nothing else was as fast. So if you had a website and you were relying on like, well, why is tech people, then you gotta submit a ticket and wait two weeks for the website to be updated. And by that time the conference is over. So here we can quickly change, you know, if we have to change a room assignment [00:41:00] or the time, or add a new session or whatever it's almost instantaneous you know, to get that, that information there.

Whereas before it was like you were depending on. Some group needs and some text strings and some remind texts and like maybe the kids would know that it was changed. But here just the speed and the ease with which stuff can be updated. I don't, I don't think there's anything else that could replicate that, especially in a way that we would, that we could afford.

Because that's the other, the other handicap there are, there are full service conference management software things out there, but I think for someone like us, this is where kind of software as a service is not, I. The best model. Because if you were paying for like seats and everyone to do stuff, generally, you know, as attendees we wouldn't, this, we wouldn't be able to afford to do that either.

So this is the best way that gives us the most functionality, customization at a price point that we can afford. Because we only need a handful of like backend teams, users. We do bump it up to business for our conferences [00:42:00] so we don't run out of API calls to. That's why it would be really great if Airtable added something to check to see how many, like, I don't know actually how many API calls were used.

I'm pretty sure we'd bust a hundred thousand if we've got, we have a lot of pages and we've got 2000 people at the conference. I think that math maths out pretty quick. 

Dan Fellars: Mm-hmm. 

Chrisiana Dominguez: But I don't really know, so just to make sure nothing breaks we do have to bump it up and then bump it down again in between.

So. 

Dan Fellars: Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. It's awesome to see how it's being used and helping the next generation might be introducing the, the kids as well to, to this technology. 

Chrisiana Dominguez: Yeah. We, we, we try, I try to get them. I also, we have a local I also have another Cory app page, whatever you wanna call it.

I don't know the question about like, how do you define an app? I don't what. We have to call everything apps. Now we can't call 'em websites. I'm not really sure. I don't know the difference. That's the number one complaint I get actually, is that this is a website and not an app and I'm not [00:43:00] entirely sure what the difference is.

'Cause I show them how to put a shortcut on their, like phone, desktop. And that's still is not magical enough for them. But but yeah, we, we introduced them my, like my local leadership team learns how to, to run stuff on the back end a little bit more. So hopefully I'm giving them. Extra tools to manage their, their life going forward.

Dan Fellars: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Okay. With.

We're gonna move on. And before we do, if you are not in our Built on Air community, we want you to join us built on air.com/join. Get you in with thousands of other Airtable fans and users talking daily about the latest and helping each other out. So check it out by built on air.com/join. Get you into our community in Slack.

We also have a newsletter that keeps you up to date on everything and subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. And then the other socials that you wanna connect with us [00:44:00] on. And let's learn about the new updated timelines. Camille, I. There you go. 

Kamille Parks: Yep. So this is a update to timelines and interfaces, specifically allowing you to show more fields on the left hand side of the screen when you're in Gantt mode.

So Airtable gives a little description of what this update was. I couldn't understand it, so I'm gonna walk through what it actually is myself. This is an interface. Go ahead. I was saying 

Dan Fellars: I couldn't, I couldn't understand that either from the descrip 

Kamille Parks: either. Yeah, it's, it's worded interestingly.

So before I kind of get started I checked in the base view. So Airtable has a timeline and a Gantt view if you're looking at it in the data view. And this feature, as far as I can tell, is not available on either the timeline or the Gantt from the data [00:45:00] view, but from the interface, which is what I'm looking now if I start editing.

And I'll collapse that down, the thing that was updated. So first things first if you're on a full page design like I am, you wanna click into the timeline itself. And then second thing, second, you wanna make sure that you flip over to the layout being Gantt versus stacked. So the difference between these just in general, and this part is not new if you're in stacked, records will appear like this. So they'll fit neatly across, you know, linear time if they can like a slot without overlapping each other. For this to be available, you kinda have to be in GPU where each of the records is its own line. So the part that's new, if we go into any of [00:46:00] these. Records that are on the Gantt view, you'll see I have certain fields that are visible as available in this popup.

What was added was for the ability to have these fields also appear to the left. So what I'm gonna do. Is turn on this toggle show, all visible fields on the left, and if I do that, I now have the ability to sort of drag this out and then I can see all of the fields and it kind of scrolls as one unit. So assignee start, deadline are all over here as well as status.

You can make these wider or more narrow as need be to get this to display however you need. I have found that it's it's best on larger screens. So if I go into preview to get rid of the right hand sidebar. I feel like I would personally have to have a pretty wide screen for [00:47:00] this to be as useful as, as I'd like to have more than, I'd say three fields visible like status.

I can see a sign I can kind of see with a little bit of scrolling, but I personally wouldn't. Have that many fields turned on. 'Cause you just, you literally wouldn't see them. But that was the update. So these are, if you've turned on editability, these are editable. So I can go in and, and adjust any of the fields that I have visible, including date fields if it's based on that date field for this Gantt view.

It kind of jumps around as you make those edits. So not. Ultra clean in terms of user experience, but it is nice that you can edit from here as well as editing from here, whichever, I guess is your preference.

Awesome. Yeah. And then I 

Dan Fellars: think 

Kamille Parks: for those who prefer light [00:48:00] mode, I'll, I'll show it in light mode as well. It might be a little easier to see. Yeah, 

Dan Fellars: so, and if you dragged the. The mid cursor. I mean, you can basically, essentially get a list view on the left. 

Kamille Parks: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Fellars: So one, how far can that go? Just halfway? Yeah.

Kamille Parks: It looks to be about halfway. 

Dan Fellars: Oh, really? It doesn't go all the way. 

Kamille Parks: Mm-hmm. Because 

Dan Fellars: one that I had is one, one of the cool features of a Gantt or, or a timeline is the ability to go, go into the settings for the timeline. Yep. Is the ability to, split multiple values into groups. Yep. And you can't get that on a normal list view.

So I was like, that might be one way to kind of get that feature of a list. 

Kamille Parks: Mm-hmm. You can't do it on a Gantt either. Oh, [00:49:00] so this, I don't know how long this has been the case, but switching to Gantt view disables quite a few features. Mm-hmm. So you can't do that splitting multiple values into groups and you also can't stack labels vertically.

Which I guess makes sense 'cause it would start interfering with the row below it. But you also can't change the height of the rows either. So I don't, I don't, I don't know why you can't do that. Interesting. Seems like it would be easier to have record heights if everything was its own dedicated line, but what do I know?

Alli Alosa: Yeah. I just wish dependencies were easier in our table. 

Kamille Parks: Yeah. So the. The benefit of using a Gantt view is supposed to be the dependency thing, which are what these lines are here. All of these, this is from a, a template that achievable provided. So these dependencies are already [00:50:00] in there, but the lines in between each of these, records mean if I put this back, I could have certain settings that automatically shift anything that's dependent on that record for me. Mm-hmm. But yeah, it's not still, there's, there's some things I think that are missing to make it as smooth as possible. 

Alli Alosa: Can you draw lines between records here to.

To create the dependency. 

Kamille Parks: Okay. You can, you kind of have to hover, this is probably a bad example 'cause these are the tiniest possible records. But if I, I'll just get rid of that. If you hover your cursor towards the sort of bottom right of a record, you kind of get this dot that's visible and then you can drag it to the.

All the way to the left of a record. I believe you could also do it from the other direction. No, you can't. I lied. So you're, you're [00:51:00] dragging from the parent to the child, basically. 

Alli Alosa: Okay. That I almost feel like is easier than actually setting them up in the linked record fields. 'cause it's just a mess.

I mean, now with the, actually no. Does dynamic filtering work with self linked tables? I don't think it does. With I dunno, I'm, I'm going down a rabbit hole now in my own head, but that, 

Kamille Parks: that might be, have to be its own, its own set of tests. Yeah. 

Dan Fellars: We, we should do another segment. 'cause I found another limitation of.

Self table linked records that I wasn't aware of this week. What was that? In DA you can't two-way data sync linked records that linked to themselves. I wasn't aware of that. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. 

Kamille Parks: For whatever reason, Airtable decided that if you also Airtable, if you switch to dark mode, it doesn't immediately switch all of your other tabs.

At some point, Airtable decided [00:52:00] that linking between tables gives you all the features in the world, but linking a. Project, or in this case of projects to another project refuses to give you like half the, the bells and whistles that a really relational database is supposed to give you. 

Dan Fellars: Mm-hmm. 

Kamille Parks: I don't know why it's been like that for a decade and they haven't changed it 

Dan Fellars: from the get go.

Yeah. Yep. So yeah, that was something we ran into. Very cool. That's interesting. So that's a good, good gives you something to, to play with there. 

Kamille Parks: Yeah. I think in, I think in general, this is pretty useful if you want like a sort of high level and your timeline isn't, like ultra dense, I would say with information because if it, if I have the data here, it's [00:53:00] also gonna show up here and that can get a little bit, I don't know, cluttered in my opinion. But it, again, this is toggle, so if you don't want to have the information on the left hand side, you don't have to have it there. You could just turn it off. And then it kind of doesn't repeat itself on the screen. I do wish I had the option of saying if I have it on the left, I don't want it.

Yeah, hovering over the record, maybe just the name gets carried over and that's it. Just so that I can. Sort of have a cleaner way of looking at all of my information 

Dan Fellars: or some fields you might want on the left, but not all the ones that you want on the popup. 

Kamille Parks: Yeah, that would also be nice because when you're selecting your fields, you have these sort of icons that appear that, you know, you can hide it or you can edit field directly see its settings.

If they could add another sort of option of being like, is it on the left? Is it on the. A timeline? [00:54:00] Is it on both? That would be one way that they could do that. Yeah. 

Dan Fellars: Yeah. 

Kamille Parks: That'd 

Dan Fellars: be nice. Awesome. Thank you. Okay. That concludes today's show. Hopefully you enjoyed it. Christiana, thank you for joining us and for all of you watching, we will be back next week for our final episode of the season.

See you all then.

intro: Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to check out our sponsor onto our backups, automated backups for Airtable. We'll see you next time on the Built On Air Podcast.